Tabla de contenidos para October 2024 en Flying

DO YOU KNOW how to fly a non-directional beacon (NDB) approach using an automatic direction finder (ADF)? Could you teach someone how to do it? Before you go off on the “new and better technology” available to instrument pilots, no one is disputing that. But the fact is that NDB approaches, while increasingly rare, are still out there. And there are still airplanes equipped with ADFs that enable the pilot to fly these NDB approaches—if only someone taught them how. NDBs are still mentioned as nonprecision approaches in FAA documentation and are still covered in the FAA’s Instrument Flying Handbook, therefore they are fair game during check rides for instrument candidates. If you have an aircraft capable of flying an NDB approach, it behooves you to learn how to do…

The jet is Swiss, yet after flying it over three days in wildly varying weather, traffic, and runway conditions, we came away feeling that the appropriate analogy is Canadian. It’s as if Paul Bunyan became a Savile Row suit-wearing investment banker—a regular at the most sophisticated business functions and social affairs, yet would periodically don a red-checked wool shirt, blue jeans and boots, tuck Babe the Blue Ox under his arm and head for the backwoods. The Pilatus PC-24 is a sleek, luxurious, large-cabin, large cargo area, single-pilot, light jet that is capable of CAT II ILS approaches. It fits smoothly into the highest volume airports, navigating the most complex arrival and departure procedures using cutting-edge avionics and yet, it can use runways as short as 4,000 feet and do…

HOW DO YOU KNOW when it is time to go beyond your basic home flight simulator and start upgrading major components? What equipment within your sim should receive your top priority in terms of budgeting? I’ll continue answering these questions and more in this second of a two-part FLYING series covering some common flight simulator component upgrades. First, my main assumption is that you’re ready to upgrade your home flight simulator components because you’ve spent time flying with your original equipment and you are ready to increase immersion and connection with your digital flying experience. Second, you don’t have unlimited funds for flight simulation, so you must make some critical decisions about which components to upgrade. Third, you’ve flown your home simulator enough to have selected a favorite aircraft or…

Short takeoff and landing (STOL) refers to the performance characteristics and often airframe and engine modifications to enhance the capability of getting in and out of short, often unimproved airstrips, or where there is no landing zone at all. The skill associated with flying STOL aircraft in challenging locations, often where go-around is not an option, has long been associated with bush pilots. However, mastering STOL aircraft capabilities and piloting techniques can make any pilot more confident, agile, and safe. And now it’s a fun new sport. In the 1980s, STOL competitions began appearing at airshows like the annual event hosted by the Alaska Airman’s Association. Since then, competitions have grown, both in the number of pilots participating in the sport and the enthusiastic fan base that eagerly awaits the…

HAVE TO HAVE IT, but can you afford it? There were several months last winter when I cared nothing about airplanes. Bedridden for a month by the one-two punch of a bone marrow transplant for acute myeloid leukemia, I was so sick that I didn’t think about my lifelong love—aviation. As I have picked myself up off the canvas, I find my old interests rekindled. Thoughts have now turned to getting an airplane. These fantasies are tempered by the realization that I’m still not out of the woods, and I’m not getting any younger. Nonetheless, you’ll find me physically at the airport and my nose in Controller. It is time to think about getting another airplane. For somebody approaching 80, there are several hurdles to aircraft ownership. What is affordable?…

QUESTION: I am preparing for my commercial pilot check ride. I’m training under Part 61 and just reached the 250 total time requirement, of which seven hours was dual instruction in the steam-gauge Cessna 172RG for the required complex endorsement. Then I had to move into a G1000-equipped Cessna 172, a technically advanced aircraft (TAA) but not complex with retractable gear, because the RG went in for maintenance. My CFI says I will need to log 10 hours of instrument time in the TAA C172 before they will sign me off for the check ride because I won’t meet the experience requirements if I don’t. Doesn’t the experience in the Cessna 172RG meet the experience requirements for the commercial certificate? ANSWER: This is a complicated question with a complicated answer. I…

ON DECEMBER 6, 2007, a Piper Dakota disappeared flying between Washington state’s Norm Grier Field (S36) and Pierce County Airport-Thun Field (KPLU) a distance of 16 nm. The commercial pilot was instrument rated and was alone except for his dog. It was a dark night, but VFR conditions prevailed. The pilot had just completed an instrument and night proficiency flight with an instructor. The pilot’s family reported him missing on December 9. The wreckage and the deceased pilot were found on December 13 some 8.8 miles southwest of the destination airport. The aircraft was located in a heavily wooded area. Search crews had flown over the area a few times before finding it. The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) determined the aircraft had entered a descending turn to the right…

WHEN I THINK BACK to the bygone years of my misbegotten youth, I can only shake my head and shudder at some of the flying that I blithely undertook without a second thought—and continually got away with. Hard IFR in junky old airplanes with no autopilot, no GPS, and minimal redundancy? Check. Over rugged mountain terrain, howling wilderness, and frigid open ocean? Check. In the dark bowels of a storm-tossed, moonless night? Sure, why not. These days I’m older and theoretically wiser—or maybe just less desperate. In my current work life I am almost pathetically cosseted with a glass cockpit, twin jet engines, multiple layers of redundancy, a usually sharp young first officer, and a whole host of supporting characters with an interest in the successful outcome of any given…

I STARTED MY AVIATION career when Ronald Reagan was president. If you do the math, that means I am coming up on 40 years as a pilot—and approximately half of that has been as a flight instructor. Although the laws of physics have not changed since the beginning of time, flight training has evolved and continues to do so. Join us as we look back on some of the key changes to flight training over the past 40 years. Ground School at Home In the early 1980s, VCRs became more popular and began appearing in many homes. For people who couldn’t fit a face-to-face ground school into their lives, ground school videotape courses, such as those created by King Schools and Sporty’s, provided the opportunity to get aviation education delivered…

SEARCHING FOR INFORMATION about Flamingos, I uncovered details about the beautiful pink bird and a hotel in Las Vegas, bearing the same name—the latter allegedly haunted by the ghost of mobster Bugsy Siegel. I should have been more specific in my query. I was actually searching for details about the extinct and largely forgotten metal airplane built at Ohio’s Lunken Airport (KLUK) in the late 1920s and early ’30s, and, specifically, about the guy who flew it in the ’30s, searching for a “river of gold” in Central and South America. The airplane was similar to other high-wing, strut-braced cabin monoplanes of the era but all metal and larger. The biggest mystery is the name. This lumbering, 115 mph corrugated-metal, single-engine airplane looks more like an ungainly albatross than the…

LAKE HICKORY, CREATED by a dam on the Catawba River in North Carolina, is long and sinuous, oriented broadly east-west. Near its western end is Hickory Regional Airport (KHKY). On a clear August day in 2023, a pilot, 63, and a passenger, 41, himself a student pilot, took off from KHKY in a Scoda Super Petrel LS, a two-seat amphibious light sport biplane manufactured in Brazil. They flew 5 miles northeast to a point where a highway bridge crosses Lake Hickory. There they turned left over the lake, made a touch-and-go landing, and then continued westward at low level. Halfway back to the airport, at a bend in the lake, the little plane was seen to dive suddenly—but too late to avoid a collision with power lines. The transmission cables…

A tailplane stall can be very violent with the controls quite literally snatched from your hands. Often it takes an enormous amount of back pressure on the controls to break the stall—sometimes even requiring that the copilot assist in this recovery. However, pilots of twin-turboprop aircraft continue to find themselves victims of an ice contaminated tailplane stall, perhaps because they may not recognize the signs and understand the differences as compared to a traditional wing stall. A few months after the tragic accident of Colgan Air Flight 3407 near Buffalo, New York, in 2009, a video originally created by the NASA Glenn Research Center in 1998 that focused on an ice contaminated tailplane stall (ICTS) was coincidently posted to YouTube (https://youtu.be/_ifKduc1hE8). Unless you’ve had your head in the sand or…

When one thinks of GA airports, innovative is not the first word that comes to mind. Most do a good job of maintaining their runways and infrastructure, which serves pilots well, but that doesn’t make them trailblazers. California’s Truckee Tahoe Airport (KTRK), however, has introduced some valuable initiatives around pilot safety that hopefully other airports will take notice of and incorporate. Truckee has been on my radar screen because of a couple of recent jet crashes, both of which involved circling instrument approaches in restricted visibility. The accident rate at Truckee is higher than my home airport, so it warranted investigation. Contributing factors may be that the airport is located deep within the Sierra Nevada, with a field elevation of 5,901 feet surrounded by rising terrain. The airport routinely has…

LOVE PEOPLE WATCHING. I could sit in the park all day and just stare. Might as well be at the zoo. Implicit in the activity is the understanding that the person being observed not be aware of the examination. It is believed that once someone knows eyes are on them, they act differently. The behavior exhibited is no longer genuine. I would argue that the behavior may be different, but it is no less real. This is a crucial distinction in aviation. The decisions I make as a pilot when I am alone versus when someone is watching are not the same, though both reflect a genuine part of myself. I strive to bring the two as close together as possible, and I’ve achieved some success over the years, but…

SO, THERE I WASÉ(Sorry, I couldn’t resist.) A very small annunciation in the upper left-hand corner of the Aspen PFD caught my eye. The percentage of internal battery power remaining was being displayed and the value was slowly decreasing. Whaaat? Why? What’s wrong with the Aspen? Another annunciation caught my eye on the other side of the panel where my JPI 830 lived. In large, red letters, the bottom of the display flashed, “VOLTS 12.7.” It took me a moment to connect the dots. The alternator had failed. A reluctant glance at the ammeter gauge confirmed my diagnosis. The needle was clearly at the zero position. We were operating on battery power only, with probably 30 minutes remaining. VFR on top of a cloud layer…above the Great Smoky Mountains. It…

On October 28, 1908, the New York Times reported, under the headline “WRIGHT TEACHES FLYING,” that Wilbur Wright was teaching a certain Count de Lambert to fly. European nobility habitually shored up its ruins with heaps of names. The full handle of Wright’s pupil, who was his first, was Charles Alexandre Maurice Joseph Marie Jules Stanislas Jacques de Lambert. After three flights totaling 35 minutes, the count told the Times reporter that the “handling of the aeroplane was simplicity itself, and he was confident that he would become proficient in a very short time.” De Lambert was a serious experimentalist himself, specializing in hydrofoil boats. He bought two Wright Flyers. When the London Daily Mail offered a 1,000-pound prize—nearly $200,000 today—for the first crossing of the English Channel by a…